Professor Catrin Webster

Professor Catrin Webster is interested in contemporary, post digital painting practice and has recently worked with film, performance and installation, as part of collaborative research with Exeter and Glasgow Universities, funded by the AHRC and Arts Council of Wales.

Catrin has exhibited widely both in the United Kingdom and overseas, including solo exhibitions in Reykjavik, Rome and group exhibitions curated by the Ikon, Birmingham, Mostyn, Llandudno and the Qatar International Cultural Festival, Doha. Examples of Catrin's work can be seen in both private and public collections, including the Arts Council of Great Britain Collection, Hayward Gallery, London.

Academic interests are centred on concepts relating landscape to philosophical thought about place and space.

With its origins in PhD research (Intimate Distance 2006-10) and dialogues with Professor Peter Merriman, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences, University of Aberystwyth (published 2009), Webster’s recent work as Leverhulme Artist in Residence (2012-13), University of Exeter addresses the practice of painting at the intersection of cultural geography, spatial theory and fine art. Professor John Wylie, Department of Geography and Life Science, University of Exeter, states that, ‘geographers have long been interested in art, and in particular landscape art – both figurative and abstract – because of the key role it plays in shaping senses of nature, natural beauty and value, and cultural identities’.

Current collaborative research with Professor Wylie, has enabled critical reflection on a number of perennial conceptual issues for both geographers and visual artists in which the cultural geography of the practice of contemporary landscape painting/drawing is explored. These include the character and formatting of spaces and objects in painterly perception, questions of proximity, distance and relation, and finally the overarching question of spatial representation and ‘semblance’ in visual art.

The overarching research question which underpins this on-going research is centred on the apprehension and performance of space and the rendering of experience through arts practice. The concept of ‘Lived Abstraction’ is key, Wylie states that:

'The ‘’lived’’ and the ‘’abstract’’ are often placed in opposition to one another. The lived often connotes the immediate, the emotional, and the bodily, or sensual while the abstract would seem to refer to the relational, the diagrammatic and the mental.

Alternatively the lived might construe the grounded and the common-sensical, and the abstract by contrast a kind of scholastic unworldliness and innocence. But as with so many such pairings that attempt to divide, experience, we can argue – no pure moment of presently ‘lived’ stands apart from its apprehension and recuperation, from forethought and memory. And equally no abstraction – no idea, no image, theorem or plan, could ultimately sever the lifeline to the lived on which it surreptitiously relies.’‌